{"id":1576,"date":"2018-06-19T16:51:53","date_gmt":"2018-06-19T16:51:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1576"},"modified":"2018-06-19T16:53:57","modified_gmt":"2018-06-19T16:53:57","slug":"verdi-v-shakespeare-falstaffs-no-contest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2018\/06\/verdi-v-shakespeare-falstaffs-no-contest.html","title":{"rendered":"Verdi v Shakespeare? Falstaff’s no contest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Garsington Opera, Bucks.<\/p>\n

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Verdi\u2019s Falstaff<\/em> seems a modern piece to me; despite its premi\u00e8re being 1893, it feels as musically up-to-date as say, Puccini\u2019s 1926 Turandot.<\/em> Verdi knew what was up in music. Before 1887, when Otello <\/em>was first heard, Verdi had been in virtual retirement since Aida<\/em> in 1871, and clearly noted what Wagner<\/a> and his ilk were writing. At Garsington, director Bruno Ravella and designer Giles Cadle have brilliantly set the piece in the dress of the late-Victorian era of its composition, with quick-change sets that include a replica of Windsor railway station and a puffing steam locomotive. This suits Arrigo Boito\u2019s libretto, which has mercifully little of the Henry IV’s about it.<\/p>\n

Ravella\u2019s staging is the best I\u2019ve seen with respect to the narrative, which is completely clear, straightforward and focussed. The plot makes sense, with little extraneous matter, but plenty of jokes, pranks and jolly japes in the right places. Jonathan Burton\u2019s excellent translations of Boito\u2019s words in the surtitles show how coherent the libretto is, which is not an impression I\u2019ve taken away from other productions. Is Boito\u2019s libretto superior to Shakespeare\u2019s original The Merry Wives of Windsor<\/em>? For my money, it is. Boito prunes the subplots, leaving only the main storyline \u2013 Falstaff\u2019s attempt to seduce, and steal from, Alice and Meg \u2013 and the subplot of the romance between Nanetta and Fenton.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Falstaff by Verdi;
Garsington Opera at Wormsley;
13 June 2018;
Sir John Falstaff – Henry Waddington;
Alice Ford – Mary Dunleavy;
Ford – Richard Burkhard;
Meg Page – Victoria Simmonds;
Mistress Quickly – Yvonne Howard;
Nannetta – Soraya Mafi;
Fenton – Oliver Johnston;
Dr. Caius – Colin Judson;
Bardolfo – Adrian Thompson;
Pistola – Nicholas Crawley;
Page (silent) – Ansh Shetty;
Conductor – Richard Farnes;
Director – Bruno Ravella;
Designer – Giles Cadle;
Lighting Designer – Malcolm Rippeth;
Movement Director – Tim Claydon;
Photo credit: \u00a9 CLIVE BARDA\/ArenaPAL;<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

At Garsington Ravella has done something \u00e0 la minute<\/em> and made the whole business the women\u2019s story, which is a little less than comic; Falstaff is, after all, attempting to abuse them, sexually and financially, and the chief plot is about empowering the women, Alice, Meg and Nanetta. Ravella does this with (thank heavens) a feather-light touch. In the opening scene some of the women are wearing sandwich-boards; but they don\u2019t bear the obvious slogans of the Women\u2019s Suffrage movement. Instead they state the punch-line of the Temperance movement of the 1880s and 90s, \u201cLips that touch liquor shall never touch ours,\u201d a dart directed at the centre of Falstaff\u2019s sack-soaked soul \u2013 his belly.<\/p>\n

Funny as this production is \u2013 how could Falstaff<\/em> not be funny? \u2013 the all-too-solid dark side of Falstaff is emphasised in his Act 3, Scene 2 humiliation. Falstaff is used by the (wonderfully costumed) fairies\/villagers as a human Maypole, raised into the air, and then bound in traditional Mayday ribbons that truss him as though he were a particularly fat joint of meat to be roasted.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Sir John Falstaff – Henry Waddington;
Photo credit: \u00a9 CLIVE BARDA\/ArenaPAL;<\/p><\/div>\n

Richard Farnes conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra with stunning variations in dynamics, at what I thought was a particularly welcome, lucid pace; less than breakneck, everything seemed to me fractionally slowed, to my pleasure, as I felt I was hearing the nuances of the score as never before. These tempi made it possible to appreciate the subtleties in Henry Waddington\u2019s superb performance of Falstaff.\u00a0 Waddington\u2019s bass-baritone is simply beautiful. I have heard bigger voices (Bryn Terfel, for instance) singing Falstaff, but never one to compare with the warm, full-chested, non-nasal sonority of Waddington, with no detectible break to the head voice, and with such generosity and stamina \u2013 as clean and mellifluous in the final fugue (the ensemble a little messy, in our second-night performance) as at the beginning. His acting is classy, too \u2013though his character comes across as vain and licentious, his repeated \u201cVa vecchio John\u201d has genuine pathos, but is sung with self-knowledge rather than self-pity.<\/p>\n

He was splendidly supported by Mary Dunleavy\u2019s severe but sparky Alice, and Soraya Mafi\u2019s soaring and only slightly silly Nanetta. Yvonne Howard as a moralising Mistress Quickly seemed to disapprove of fun even while she was having it herself. Ford is usually a cypher, but Richard Burkhard made him in turns jealous, raging and impotent, while singing every bit as caressingly as Oliver Johnston\u2019s Fenton. Even Falstaff\u2019s Page, Ansh Shetty, made the most of his silent role, contributing boyish good humour, while showing that one person, at least, still loves Falstaff.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Sir John Falstaff – Henry Waddington;
Photo credit: \u00a9 CLIVE BARDA\/ArenaPAL;<\/p><\/div>\n

Owing to accidents of fate, this is my first country-house opera of the season. The charms of Wormsley, where the Garsington Opera has been hosted for eight years now, are great \u2013 the grounds are glorious, the auditorium intimate and comfortable, the food and wine are exemplary, the hospitality feels genuine and everyone from the catering manager to the security guards seem to take pleasure from being helpful. Garsington Opera is in its thirtieth season, and I\u2019ve been following it since its beginnings as the project of our friends, Leonard and Rosalind Ingrams; when it moved from the Bloomsbury Group-haunted Garsington Manor to Mark Getty\u2019s Wormsley, it could easily have lost some of its homelier attractions. It didn\u2019t, and congratulations and thanks are in order all around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Garsington Opera, Bucks.   Verdi\u2019s Falstaff seems a modern piece to me; despite its premi\u00e8re being 1893, it feels as musically up-to-date as say, Puccini\u2019s 1926 Turandot. Verdi knew what was up in music. Before 1887, when Otello was first heard, Verdi had been in virtual retirement since Aida in 1871, and clearly noted what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1576","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogroll-2","7":"category-elsewhere","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-pq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1583,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions\/1583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}